September 2024 – MetaBrainz Blog

Major upgrade for mirrors: November 25, 2024

MusicBrainz is announcing a major mirror upgrade for November 25, 2024. The minimum required version of Docker Compose will change from v1.21.1 to v2. Search will be upgraded from Solr 7 to Solr 9. Mirrors will likely require a reinstall from scratch, we will provide instructions by release day.

This upgrade is not going to break replication for existing mirrors, even mirrors that have enabled live search. However, Solr 7 dumps will no longer be available.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 24

MetaBrainz Summit 24 is upon us! September 23-27 in New Delhi, India.

We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-09-17

This week we offer you a bunch of bug fixes and improvements before the team flies to India for the 2024 MetaBrainz summit. Especially noteworthy is another derat contribution, fulfilling a very popular improvement request to try and help editors reuse existing release groups instead of adding duplicates. Thanks derat. Therat.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to derat for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, Cyberskull, DenizC, ernstlx, Vac31., Victini and wileyfoxyx for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Dibou, Echelon666, n26, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-09-17.0.

Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project

Hello ListenBrainz community!

As you know, we’ve been working hard on building recommendations and other music discovery tools as part of ListenBrainz. Our frustrations with online streaming providers and their questionable discovery features have long been a source of frustration for us, so we worked hard to build recommendations with as little bias as possible.

Fortunately, we’re not alone in our frustration with the steaming providers – researchers at Aalborg University, Denmark and Lille University, France are currently questioning the fairness of these music recommendations and have asked ListenBrainz and its community to help them with this task.

The researchers are looking for ListenBrainz users to give their permission for their public ListenBrainz data to be used as part of this research. If fair music discovery services are of importance to you, please read on and consider granting the researchers permission to use your data:

Share your listening data with the researchers and help us fight for a fair and transparent music streaming ecosystem!

GSoC 2024: Transferring Playlists Between SoundCloud, Apple Music and ListenBrainz

Introduction

Hello! My name is Rimma Kubanova (AKA rimskii on IRC and rimma-kubanova on GitHub). I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. My inspiration to participate in Google Summer of Code came from seeing my seniors’ experiences. I began contributing to MetaBrainz because I felt their goals and technologies aligned perfectly with my interests and skills.

After making my first contributions, I decided to apply to GSoC, and to my delight, my proposal was accepted!

Proposal

ListenBrainz generates music recommendation playlists based on a user’s listening history and habits. These playlists can be enjoyed directly in ListenBrainz and automatically exported to the user’s Spotify account. However, currently, ListenBrainz only supports exporting to Spotify, which limits the user experience.

My project focused on expanding this functionality by integrating support for exporting these playlists to other external music services like SoundCloud and Apple Music. Additionally, I proposed adding an import feature to allow users to bring their playlists from these services into ListenBrainz.

My proposal can be found here.

Picard 2.12.3 released

Picard 2.12.3 has been released, fixing an issue with some tooltips and disallowing using a directory separator as replacement character.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-09-02

While the team has been taking it slow in August, the volunteer derat has not! This is a small update with only four improvements, of which the biggest three are his work, including a way to reorder artists inside an artist credit.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks again to derat for having contributed to the code. Thanks to yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to 4irefall, Early6431, Echelon666, KenParker_CN, Libra, MØĐĪ, Nom d’utilisateur, salo.rock, tanio, thephy, tkusano and Vaclovas Intas for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-09-02.0.